I took costume design in Art School which entailed a lot of sewing. The instructor would tell us to do a garment in a certain way, and when Dana and I took it home for the weekend, Mother would say that's not the right way to do it. We had fights. Dana took illustration but was in a costume design class with me. Sewing wasn't her main interest.

In my last year at Art School, I got top place in the fashion show for the garments that I had made. Actually, another girl got more points for her garment than I did for one of mine, but Ms. Orth added the scores together for two of my garments so that I would win. That's why awards are always suspect to me. After I graduated, I went to New York right away, because I knew if I stayed home, mother would engulf me; her personality was so strong. When I got to New York, I went to the building where all of the top houses were and went in cold turkey asking for a job. I was all dressed up for the occasion I thought. I wore a white and green print dress, a white hat with a ribbon, and white gloves and shoes. I got in the elevator and started from the top down. I noticed that all of the women were dressed in dark colors. I felt like a little hick, which I was. After going to two or three places, I did get a job. They took me on-- white shoes or not. That very day, the owner called me into her office, and said that the man from the union had said that I couldn't work there, because I wasn't in the union. I couldn't afford the union dues, and they didn't want to pay me union wages. I never went back to that building. I was always intimidated. I stayed in New York that weekend. It was scary, since I didn't know one single person there. I went back to Ocean City, and then Ms. Orth, who we called Orthy, called and said she found me a job. She made an appointment for me to meet a Laros representative for lunch, and he offered me a job. Laros was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and while I worked there, I paid for room a board with a couple whose daughter, Selma, became a friend of mine. Selma was six or seven years older than I, and I always hesitated to call her by her first name in front of her parents. We were so timid back then! I remember being embarassed to pull the cord for my stop in Ocean City.

The job at Laros was satisfying and I learned a lot. The design room was right in the factory as it was in many firms. I was the designer's assistant. She designed women's lingerie. I got restless in Bethlehem and wanted to move to New York. I answered an ad in Women's Wear Daily for a designer. I went for an interview in New York and got the job at Coroseal designing raincoats. I had a big salary of $75 dollars a week. I think that was a big salary in those days. The showroom was on the 69th floor of the Empire State Building, and the design room was in the factory at 40th Street on the West Side. When I went back and told the people at Laros I was leaving, they said that my new job was in Hell's Kitchen, which scared me, but nothing ever happened. While I worked there in the factory, the foreman was a sweet, old Jewish man who asked me to dinner at his home with his wife on a Friday evening. He insisted on riding back on the subway with me from Brooklyn to Manhattan, even though he didn't have to. The subways were considered safe. During the war, we had coupons for many necessities. I traded him my sugar and flour coupons for his shoe coupon, and I bought a pair of ice skates with it.

At some point, they moved the manufacturing up to a bigger factory in the Bronx, and I rode the subway every day. The guy who was running Coroseal was Dick Friedman, and it turns out that he was a distant cousin of Stanley. Dick Friedman gave Stanley a job to expedite shipping the orders. He worked at the same factory that I did, and that's where we met. We were married. Because it was just after World War II, it was impossible to get a telephone or to get a place to live. People would look at the Obituaries and try to be the first one there to get an apartment. We were at City Hall in Manhattan. Not very glamorous. Stanley moved in with me in the apartment that I had on 53rd Street. I always said that he married me for the apartment. Some people who had large aparments would let out rooms, and Stanley had lived in such a room.

(I had gotten my apartment on 53rd Street from a girl I knew from art school who was left at the altar. When I moved to New York, I lived in the Martha Washington Women's Hotel. I knew she had that apartment, and I wanted it. It also had a telephone. Her girlfriend left, and I moved in with her. When she married my cousin Eben, whom she had met through me, she moved out.)

That summer, Stanley's mother Bertha, who was a widow, came to visit us and stayed a while. It was a very small apartment. After she left, she wanted us to find an apartment for her, and we found one that was not so desireable. But being young, we thought it was okay. It was one floor higher than ours. She hated it, and Stanley's Aunt Sadie was horrified. We could see after a while that it wasn't working out, and she moved back in with us.

Uncle Jerry was dismissed from the Armed Services, and he moved in with us too. Needless to say, it was a full house. Our apartment only had two rooms: one large room and one small one. In the large room, we had a hot plate and a small refrigerator, and we had to wash the dishes in the bathroom sink.

We finally got an apartment across the street on the south side of 53rd. It was bigger than the one we just left but had the same number of rooms. Stanley encouraged me to go freelance, and we rented a little below-surface space for a showroom and a workroom. We got power sewing machines and gown forms. Stanley was a good salesman. He always got me the best money for the work. I would have worked for practically nothing, because I loved it. After a while, we moved from our first space into two apartments: one for living, and one that was a showroom and workroom. It was much bigger. Later on, we were able to get

a very generous contract with the firm that had the franchise for Schiaparelli.

Stanley was also very good if there was someone or something unpleasant to deal with. He would always do it for me. People liked Stanley, especially the older Jewish ladies who teased him. They thought he looked Irish and he would go along with it. And then he would spring this on them, "Baruch atoi adonai." And they would be delighted.

In those days, I used to wear a switch of human hair to fill out my thin hair and try to look sophisticated. After a while it would get dirty from hairspray and whatnot and I would send it out to be washed. It just so happened that the switch was getting cleaned when Schiaperelli came to our offices, and I felt I must not have looked sophisticated.

One Saturday in the spring of 1968, I was set up in Campbell's Flea Market. It was on the corner of one road to the shore and a crossroad. It was pleasant there because of the trees. This one year was bad because all of the gypsy moths were out and you could hear them chomping away, but otherwise it was pleasant. On this particular Saturday, I saw a girl across the way, and I thought that looks like Lia, but I thought: that can't be, she and Jon went to the shore today. But when I looked up I saw sure enough, it was Lia and there was Jonathan. They had been to the shore, Avalon was Jonathan's favorite spot, and on the way back stopped off. I had always wanted Jonathan to come with me to flea markets, but he always resisted. I thought that if he collected something like Presidential buttons or such, it would be something interesting for him to do; but, no sale. Of course, it was Lia who had persuaded him to come and there he was docilely following along, carrying packages. Of course, that was the beginning of something and I must say that Lia always had a good eye for the treasure underneath the grunge, and she was also never afraid to spend what I thought was big bucks for things. And those two attributes have carried her a long way in this business.